The Discovery

Knowing When and How to Use Questions

One of the most important things we have learned in selling over years has to be that questioning is the most important part of the sales process. It will make or break you as a salesperson.

Hot Tip: Questioning is one of the best ways to separate you from your competition, regardless of who they are. If you are a master at questioning you will become a master at sales. Knowing when and how to use questions is crucial. So why is questioning so important? Frankly, there are a number of reasons. We will mention a couple here.

First is that all through the sales process we are constantly questioning, or at least we should be, at every step. From the minute you walk into a potential client’s door and say to the receptionist, “How are you?”, that is a question; all the way through to the end when we ask for the order or business, it’s all about questioning.

It’s so important for each of us to not just randomly shoot questions from off the hip, but actually have a process and a plan that we follow. More on the details of the process on another page, but did you know that there is actually a process for questioning? Just like there is a sales process, there is also a questioning process. This is part of doing it correctly and with impact.

Let us share with you a statement by Jeffrey Gitomer from his book called the “Sales Bible”; he says,

“The most important aspect of making a sale is also a major weakness of every salesperson. Asking questions are so critical, you’d think it would be the topic of training every week. Yet most sales people have never taken one training program in the science of asking a question.”

So tell us, how many training programs on questioning have you taken? That’s why you are here and reading this, we hope.

The second reason that questioning is so important is we have a strong belief that salespeople, in general, are not good at this part of the sales process and definitely not excellent at it. This is a good thing for those of us studying the science of questioning because we have a wonderful opportunity to differentiate ourselves from our competition by using great questioning skills.

You must become a master and an expert at this and by so doing you will not have to worry about the competition so much. It won’t happen overnight, but with consistent practice, it will happen.

Many of you have gone through sales training courses before, and many of those trainings focus on how to handle objections and how to close, of which most of the techniques are outdated and overused.

Most trainers, however, do not focus on proper questioning and information gathering. Their focus is on the ABC’s of sales, which is, “Always Be Closing”. To me that is a flawed theory. What are we closing on if we haven’t properly identified what the prospect really is after? We are just trying to make a sale, period.

In his book, “The 250 Sales Questions to Close the Deal”, Steven Schiffman says that,

“90 percent of the sales presentations that do not turn into revenue have some kind of problem in the information-gathering phase.”

The interesting thing about his book is it is not about closing questions, but about the process of asking questions; so you don’t get 250 questions on how to ask for the order, but it will teach you about the order of asking questions. Again, it is a process to be followed.

The above statement by Steven Schiffman hits right on track with what we have been teaching for years: that we need to become masters at questioning. That 90 percent is a really high number and indicates to me that we are just not focusing on the discovery session like we should be.

It validates once again how we can truly separate ourselves from the competition if we take advantage of it. You have an opportunity to go far beyond the rest of the sales world and be excellent at this.

Once again, we will always believe that the most important part of the sales process is questioning because from the beginning of the sales process to the end of the sales process it is questions, questions, questions.

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